Moscow Vanguard Art

Ambitious and interdisciplinary, "Moscow Vanguard Art: 1922-1992" tells the story of generations of artists who resisted Soviet dictates on aesthetics, spanning the Russian avant-garde, socialist realism, and Soviet postwar art in one volume. Drawing on art history, criticism, and political theory, Margarita Tupitsyn unites these three epochs, mapping their differences and commonalities, ultimately reconnecting the postwar vanguard with the historical avant-garde. With a focus on Moscow artists, the book chronicles how this milieu achieved institutional and financial independence, and reflects on the theoretical and visual models it generated in various media, including painting, photography, conceptual, performance, and installation art. Generously illustrated, this ground-breaking volume, published in the year that marks the centennial of the October Revolution, demonstrates that, regardless of political repression, the spirit of artistic experiment never ceased to exist in the Soviet Union.